Wednesday, 30 January 2013

'Mr Jameson usually made me happy'

A surprise bonus post because I have finished all
my packing for Berlin especially early and am waiting to leave to catch a
train... and because this book is so fantastic it deserves to be blogged about.
I very much enjoyed Gaynor Arnold’s Girl
in a Blue Dress, but with After Such
Kindness, she has excelled herself. Note that there will be spoilers for
this book throughout this post; as the elliptical reviews of it in the Guardian and the Independent indicate, it’s impossible to write satisfactorily about
it without spoiling the central twist.

This novel takes as its point of departure the
relationship between Charles Dodgson – alias Lewis Carroll – and Alice Liddell,
whom he famously photographed as a child in various states of undress. However,
other than appreciating the many Wonderland references in this novel, I’m not sure
if keeping this historical connection in mind while reading helps more than it
hinders. Having read the recent The
Mystery of Lewis Carroll by Jenny Wolf, which forcefully argues that
Dodgson was not unusual in his tastes, situating his predilection for innocent
little girls within the context of its time, it’s hard to get such debates out
of your head if you’re focusing on real-life parallels, and at first I kept
trying to assess whether the Dodgson character in this novel, John Jameson, was
‘guilty’ or ‘innocent’. Reading the novel in this way is pointless for three
reasons. Firstly, Arnold clearly notes that the novel is not meant to be simply
a disguised retelling of the Dodgson-Liddell relationship; secondly, she is
obviously more interested in the fetishisation of innocence and denial of
natural sexual feeling of the times than in indicting Jameson of anything; and
thirdly... well, read on.

To build on the second point, Arnold notes in the
afterword that Dodgson was not alone in his views on ‘child-women’ as the
ideal. As she splendidly analyses in Girl
in a Blue Dress, Dickens was also obsessed with innocence, as were Ruskin
and Kingsley, and she uses the celebrated diarist the Rev. Francis Gilbert as
an example of an ‘apparently
well-balanced man’ who also bought into this cult. Therefore, it’s
important from the beginning to realise that this book is not about painting
John Jameson as a deviant monster – difficult as some of his thoughts are to
stomach – but about criticising a culture that suppresses both men and women’s
natural expression of their sexuality and subverts it into highly problematic
channels. The victim here is the Alice Liddell figure, Daisy, who is eleven
when she first meets Jameson and still only twenty when she looks back to her
childhood experiences as a young married woman. We realise swiftly that Daisy
is dealing with a childhood trauma; she has violently resisted her gentle
husband’s sexual advances, has a complete memory blackout between the ages of
eleven and fifteen, and is terrified when she rediscovers her childhood diary.
As we read the diary along with her and realise that it deals almost entirely
with her friendship with Jameson, we feel we know the story that Arnold is
telling; the dreadful impact of the predatory Jameson’s abuse upon Daisy and
its distortion of her later life.

However, there is a twist in this tale. As we
gradually realise during the final third of the novel, Daisy’s trauma does not
in fact stem from her experiences with Jameson, but from continuous sexual
abuse from her father, Daniel Baxter, over her four missing years. As we
already know, Daniel is enraptured by innocence as well; when he first met
Daisy’s mother, Evelina, she was fifteen and wanted to join a chaste religious
group of young women at Caerwen House. He viewed her as ‘an angel’ and won her
by allowing her to ‘convert’ him and end his dissolute life. After a mutually
satisfying sexual relationship through many years of marriage, the couple are
now irrevocably separated physically because a doctor has ruled that another
childbirth would kill Evelina, and Daniel turns his sexual frustration and
fixation on purity onto Daisy. Again, Victorian values are implicated in the
abuse, but the real tragedy is nineteenth-century society’s inability to hear
Daisy’s story or to fit it into their view of reality. Jameson’s photographs
are twice at fault in this narrative. A naked image of eleven-year-old Daisy
acts as a catalyst for the beginning of her father’s abusive behaviour, and
when her husband sees the same image, years later, he is furious with Daisy,
although he has already been unable to believe her confession about her father,
a reaction that she is unable to comprehend: ‘I’m horrified that Robert finds it so hard to believe that Papa was capable
of wrongdoing, yet is so ready to think me a child seductress because I have
taken off my clothes, and am trying to look pleasant for a photograph.’
Trapped in the Madonna/whore dichotomy, Daisy cannot account for herself in any
way that her husband can understand.

Nevertheless, perhaps there is a final twist that makes
the novel even more interesting than it has been already. As Daisy unravels her
past, she comes to realise that her memories of John Jameson are perfectly
clear; she believes that he has not abused her, claims he is not at fault, and
when, at twenty, she receives an invitation from him to tea, she longs to
accept it: ‘I’d forgotten how happy John
Jameson always made me with his incapacity to take anything very seriously.
Just to read his words makes me feel young and carefree and full of vitality,
as if I have escaped into another world’. Given how wretched Daisy is at
this point, the reader can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief with her,
despite our serious qualms. It seems clear that Jameson did abuse Daisy’s
trust, taking advantage of her respect for him to photograph her for his own
gratification; he gave no thought to how his actions have seriously affected
her life; and he has photographed many other little girls since. In fact, our last
sight of him in the novel is his request to a new little girl, Amy, for a
photograph, in language which makes a mockery of ‘consent’, even if an
eight-year-old could meaningfully give it: ‘I
have another question to ask you, but it’s not at all hard, because there’s
only one answer and that is, yes’.

And yet, perhaps it is a measure of the bleakness
of this novel that this deeply troubling relationship is also one of Daisy’s
few sources of happiness. Apart from her devoted nurse, Nettie, who is
dismissed early on in the book, there is no other adult who seems willing to
listen to her or care for her. As Jameson says when they are forced to part, ‘I hesitated to abandon her to the Scylla and
Charybdis of her vicarage life – her clever, cold mama and her wild, distracted
father... But I could not force my way into the house, and I could not force
Daisy out of it. I had no power at all.’ Despite knowing everything Jameson
has thought and felt about Daisy, their parting, and her distress, is still
deeply affecting; because we know he is leaving her to four years of hell. Her attachment to him might be written off as a form of Stockholm syndrome, but I think this would do a disservice to her recognition of the value of their friendship; how he listened to her, made her laugh, wrote puzzles and games for her, took her out of her unhappiness. Drawing together these strands, Arnold has produced a thought-provoking and
complex novel which is not just about the folk-devil of the abusive stranger,
but shows how, for abuse to be prevented and recognised, there must be social
and cultural shifts as well as different individual choices. And in the figure of John Jameson, it indicates how relationships with such an unequal power balance can be truly positive and deeply dangerous, both at the same time.

2 comments:

Thank you! I'm so relieved to have read your review here. I read this book over the last two days and found it compelling, disturbing, and deeply tragic. I went looking today for reviews and found chiefly that others had thought it clever and engaging - while I was carrying the notion of the traumatised and courageous Margaret in my mind and railing against the abusive father, mother, horrid nurse, husband and doctor who between them surely broke her, the former by his hideous abuse and the latter with their dismissal and belittlement - responses women still receive to allegations of abuse.

I badly wanted to find that someone else had been as moved and disturbed as I by Margaret's situation in the confines of her life.

Thanks for such an interesting comment. I think this must be one of the most disturbing, and yet realistic, books I've read about sexual abuse (other than Robin McKinley's 'Deerskin', which is excellent, but also doesn't make for easy reading). Arnold has a background in social work with children and families in Birmingham, I believe, so that may have informed the novel. It certainly has a lot of resonance in the present.

ABOUT ME

I'm a Stipendiary Lecturer in History at St Anne's College, Oxford, and am also currently writing a novel (or three) in my 'spare time'. I like books, decaf coffee and cocktails, particularly dry martinis.